It’s part of a two-day festival – at The Chapel Performance Space at Good Shepherd Center in Wallingford – of music and some video/multimedia works (most in 3D audio) created primarily by faculty and grad students from UW’s Center for Digital Arts and Experimental Media (DXARTS), and School of Music. (I feel really honored to be included on this.)

The backstory: In the past few years, I’ve taken 20 credits at University of Washington (in DXARTS and the School of Music) – to check things out and try to up my game. And within that time, the level and type of my output (and also my awareness of contemporary activities in the field) has greatly changed.

My new piece, Transcendental Object, that’s being presented at this concert, was largely influenced by Iannis Xenakis (and his use of randomness/stochastic processes); and also by Josh Parmenter and Hector Bravo Benard – who were teaching the three classes I took during 2012-2013. Hector’s studies at the Koninklijk Conservatorium in Holland (and from what I hear, the Holland Sound) show(s) its influence here.

The piece is for four channels, a.k.a. “quad“ (four speakers surrounding the audience). It utilizes, among other things, Granular FM Synthesis – where each grain is modulated with frequency modulation.

Most or all of the work in this concert is either written entirely with computer code (as my piece is), or combines acoustic instrumentation with computer code. Most of us are using the programming language and environment, SuperCollider. [This is what’s taught to a lot of the composers at UW these days, and it’s really piqued my interest in recent years; both because it’s one of the newest streams in the classical tradition (originating in the 50’s with the work of people like Max Mathews and Karlheinz Stockhausen), and because it’s one of the areas in music that I’ve known the least about.]

I hope to share more about this piece, and to present it in other times/places. It marks a new type/stage of my output – which would fall under categories like new music, sound art, etc.

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